How To Use EDDM To Market Your Dry Cleaners!Every Door Direct Mail –USPS

If you don’t know anything about it, EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) is a way to mail to postal routes very CHEAP! The going rate right now is about 18.5 cents per mailing piece.

EDDM is great for marketing your route business because you can ONLY mail to postal routes (that’s how you get the cheap rates) which should be pretty close to your delivery routes.

As you might know, I’m in the Dry Cleaning Marketing consulting business. I use my delivery business as a “marketing laboratory” to test out direct mail and other advertising media.

EDDM was a hard code to crack. It was hard because we couldn’t use demographics and everybody and their brother started using it so your prospects’ mailboxes were full of postcards and menus of every kind. It’s slowed down a bit and there are things you can do to your mailing to separate yourself from the flood of EDDM mail that everyone gets.

I’ve got a little report that explains this in much more detail and some EDDM postcard samples of the ones we use. If you’d like to get the report and samples, go to: NoDoorKnocking.com/eddm

With EDDM there are NO envelopes. You CANNOT address to an individual. You can use a variety of postcards and a menu size mailer too.

Here are the sizes you can use:
I’ve tried the menu size mailer first with no luck. And then I started to test the postcards at various sizes and black/white vs. color.

Before we get into what sizes and colors work better, I’ve got to discuss briefly what goes into a direct mail postcard (or any direct mail piece for that matter).

#1: The MOST important ingredient of a direct mail postcard is the HEADLINE. The HEADLINE determines 90% of the success of the mail piece. I test lots of headlines. I’ve tested hundreds of them in my 8 years of consulting with dry cleaners. Most business owners think if a postcard looks good and everyone says it looks professional and pretty, that it’s going to work. Not true.

I’ve been at this for a while and I CAN’T guess what’s going to work and what won’t work with certainty. Only your dry cleaning prospects know what is going to work. They tell you that by becoming a route customer or not becoming a route customer.

#2: The next most important ingredient of a direct mail postcard is the OFFER. What are you OFFERING to get your route customer to try you out. What are you going to give them so that they will at least give you a try. I’m going to give you the offer I use, but first I’ve got a few things to tell you. I tried percentage-off offers. I tried buy-2-get-1-FREE offers. I tried “straight-out” money off offers.

The “straight-out” money offers worked the best. I tried $50 in FREE dry cleaning all the way down to $10 in FREE dry cleaning. What do you think worked best? This blew my mind. Never would of guessed it. I hope you do.

The $10 OFFER was the winner!

Never would of thought in a million years. I guess the other offers sounded too good to be true.

So everything I do has an offer of “$10 in FREE Dry Cleaning” in it. No matter if it’s an ad in the newspaper or a postcard mailing—it works universally in all advertising mediums.

#3: Telling a story is the next ingredient. On the postcard tell a little bit about you and your dry cleaner. People want to know about that kind of stuff. They want to be entertained and feel like they know you.

#4: The next and last ingredient is a DEADLINE. You MUST have a DEADLINE or your direct mail postcard will not work as well. It’s like the sale they’re having at your local Macy’s. “It’s this weekend only,” that gets you to buy by this weekend. You’re doing the same thing with your deadline in the postcards.

The “DEADLINE” thing kind of held me up with even trying out the EDDM mailings. Why? Because back when I tried “bulk mail” through the post office (which is basically the same as EDDM), they delivered it when they felt like it. Sometimes it got out 2-3 weeks after you wanted it to.

If you’ve got a deadline in 2 weeks, your postcard could get delivered past the deadline and that just killed your mailing dead. In my tests, the post office has gotten lots better at delivering when they say they’re going to. Once I got that taken care of, it was on to testing the headlines first, the offer ($10 in FREE) and the sizes and black/white or color postcards.

Lots of testing goes into a direct mail postcard. You just don’t slap it together and mail it out. You have to meticulously test every part, one at a time, to see what works best.

With EDDM I decided to use the “Carpet Bombing” mailing technique. I have an area in my town that I want route customers. I decided to mail that market area every month—month in and month out.

This is the same area that I have customers. This is the same area that gets my bag drops. These houses see lots of me. They see my van coming through twice a week and they see my orange bags hanging on their neighbors’ doors.

Doesn’t take too many route customers to justify sending out the EDDM “Carpet Bomb” mailings. I’m willing to pay $100 for a route customer that generates $600/year in revenue. If I get a “half of a percent” from the EDDM “Carpet Bomb” mailings, I’m doing just great.

I was surprised that neither the size of the postcard nor the black/white or color did not make much of a difference. There was a little uptick by using color vs. B/W—but not much.

And sending out a different postcard every month did make a BIG difference. Same enough so they knew who I was, but different enough to make them read it and respond by becoming a route customer.

I’ve got a little report that explains this in much more detail and some EDDM postcard samples of the ones we use. If you’d like to get the report and samples, go to: NoDoorKnocking.com/eddm

…and I’ll send them out to you right away.

Would love your comments below…

Call 888-661-1992 to set up a FREE 30-minute consult with me about your routes and/or your counter business or anything you’d like to talk about in your dry cleaning business.

Welcome to drycleaningmarketing.com

Hi, my name is Greg Colosi and I can show you how to get boatloads of new route customers for your delivery routes WITHOUT knocking on doors. If you'd like to find out how, fill out the form above this. Thanks.